Leveraging Open-Source Communities for Professional Development

Before I discovered the beauty of coding…

I studied political science, comparative politics and international relations both in my undergrad and grad schools. But I focused my degrees on research using both quantitative and qualitative research methods and gained data analytics and statistical skills along the way. Besides learning to conduct a research project and analyze the results in STATA during a graduate course, I did not have any background in coding and data science in general.

I never even had an interest in coding or thought it was possible for someone like me, a woman, to have a career in such a field.

When I realized that my plan to become a social science researcher and academic is not working out I decided I needed to jump start my career with a new skill. I’ve always had an interest in data analysis, so I took an R for Data Analytics program form UCSD extension and came out of the program with RStudio installed on my laptop and knowing how to code print(hello world).

How do you learn data science?

Masters in data science
Boot camp
Learn on the job
Learn on your own

Important things needed in a learning journey

Motivation 🙌

Support 🩼

…the most important things in a learning journey and the difficult things to find.

Finding a way out

Open source communities

Public Communities

Twitter

Mastodon

Private communities

R-ladies

Women Who Code (WWCode)

R for Data Science (R4DS)

Data Visualization Society

Observable

Posit

How to leverage those resources?

Follow social media pages of private communities
Join slack channels of private open sources communities
Follow accounts and pages of companies like posit and observable and their community groups.
Determine your career path! Build a Career in Data Science book and podcast
Follow events, workshops, courses that relate to your career path

How to leverage those resources?

Follow linkedin pages like the data analysis linkedin page and the data analytics study group
Look out for contributors, community leaders and events participants, follow them on social media
Podcasts are great resources to stay up to date with industry and get introduced to industry leaders and learn from their experiences.
Engage in online platforms. Ask questions and answer questions. Make your work public!
Finally, reach out to people!

Thank you!

Website

Twitter